Officials call vampire bat report a fly-by-night tale

By Don Finley

Updated 12:16 am, Tuesday, September 18, 2012

The scary prospect of vampire bats in Texas, which surfaced with a San Antonio man's claim that he and a friend were bitten on a camping trip in Central Texas, drew skeptical responses Monday from experts who say the presence of vampire bats this far north is unlikely.

Rusten Ramsey told KSAT-TV on Sunday that after he and a group of friends camped for the night in the back of a pickup in Johnson City, he awoke with about 10 nickel-sized blood spots on his arm, and a friend's girlfriend had bite marks on her face. He said doctors in Temple told him that vampire bats were likely to blame.

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“At first I honestly thought it was a joke when I read it,” said Dianne Odegard with Austin-based Bat Conservation International, which sponsors research on vampire bats in Latin America. “It sounds like the kind of thing NPR might do on April 1.”

Vampire bats are a major agricultural pest in much of Mexico, Central and South America, feeding on cattle and sometimes passing along rabies to both animals and humans. They make tiny bites in sleeping animals with razor-sharp teeth, and then lap up the blood — they don't suck it, as many people think. Most animals are not awakened by the bites.

So far, their known habitat has stopped far short of the Rio Grande.

“There are no vampire bats in Texas as far as we know,” said Chris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services. “They're generally found about 150 miles south of the border in southern Tamaulipas state, and farther west in the Copper Canyon area of Chihuahua state. The veterinarian in our South Texas region has neither seen nor heard any credible evidence of the existence of vampire bats in the area.”

Several computer models, including one by a Texas State University researcher, have predicted that climate change might bring them closer to the United States. Ivan Castro-Arellano, an assistant professor of biology at Texas State in San Marcos, has said it's possible they might cross the border at some point. But he said the sudden appearance of the bats in Central Texas is “very, very, very unlikely.”

“If the animals were already starting to come over here, we would start getting reports at the border, in the Valley, in Corpus Christi. Then it would be moving north,” Castro-Arellano said, adding that ranchers would be the first to know. “For every person, hundreds of cattle are going to be bitten first.”

Another model, published last month by Oklahoma State University biologists, found that even with climate change, vampire bats were unlikely to move into the U.S. because of its limited temperature variability.

Ramsey sought rabies treatment at University Hospital's ExpressMed Clinic on Sunday. He could not be reached for comment Monday.

Bats are the most common cause of rabies in people in the United States, but usually from domestic species. In 2010, a 19-year-old Louisiana man contracted rabies from a vampire bat, but an investigation found he was bitten in Mexico.

Unless the bat is caught for testing, it's recommended that people who even suspect possible physical contact with a bat get post-exposure rabies shots. Many people infected with bat rabies don't even realize they were bitten.

“The only record of a vampire bat in Texas was from 1967,” Odegard said, “and it was a hairy-legged vampire bat that was captured in an old railroad tunnel somewhere. There's no way to know how it got there.